Internet enabled drip coffee

A fresh pot of coffee is never more than a tweet away with the Tweet-a-Pot. It works in much the same way that our Troll Sniffing Rat does. For that build we used a Python script to monitor our comments, and this does the same except that the script read tweets through the Twitter API. It watches for a specific hash tag (#driptwit) and when found it sends a serial command to an Arduino. The microcontroller then writes a digital pin high to actuate a relay, powering up the coffee maker.

An Arduino? Really? Overkill island man…you’re already sending a serial command, there are serial relays available from various vendors…like this….http://www.pencomdesign.com/pencomstore/agora.cgi?p_id=0010
Yes, that’s not a true hack, but part of hacking is to realize when something has been done before, and is easily packaged, and then exploiting it to make your system or idea better…

Aside from that, neat idea. We had a point set up on our old television transmitter site that did the same thing. The remote control was a DTMF system, and we set an output up to start the coffee if we were heading out for late night repairs. When you got there, it was hot and ready.

@robomonkey overkill for something that you can find laying around collecting dust compared to the $48+shipping serial relay? maybe he wants to add to the project later on, @Claudio suggested that it tweeted back.

this guy probably wanted to kill an afternoon and wanted to have a little fun. That’s what the arduino is all about, no?

@robomonkey Seems a bit pricey, and with an arduino you can expand on the idea as claudio suggested, or reuse it later for one of the many arduino projects.
Still overkill though it’s true.

BTW you can buy cheap ($15ish) remote control sets with 2 or 3 units that can switch 1000W and a remote, which you can interface the buttons through a simple FET to computer/arduino-control them, and then you can put the coffee maker anywhere and operate another device too.
Just throwing it out there.

Also that coffee pot doesn’t have an auto off (we bought a very similar to that from Family Dollar for $8.00 for survival at my father in law’s and were VERY surprised when we came back and the house was still standing lol.
My solution: Wall outlet timer he had in a drawer keeps it on for three hours and then turns off the outlet. Now it even has an auto brew feature as you fill it at night before bed and when you wake up it has been on and brewed for an hour ;) It doesn’t “talk” to the web tho…

Also overkill (but less so) is where you replace both the laptop and the Adruino with one of the easily-hacked routers supported by DD-WRT.

A wireless router could act as a wireless client on the LAN, poll the twitter account, drive the relay, and listen to other sensors (maybe tweeting back when the pot’s empty, as someone suggested). New or used hackable routers are cheap, especially considering that folks are replacing their old WRT-54G routers with newer “N” style ones.

(Note that an old wrt-54g does not have exposed serial or USB ports, but there are internal hookups on the motherboard. That’s all you need to drive the 120V relay).

I just used the same relay paired with arduino mini & ir receiver/remote to control the lights on the christmas tree this year. It is probably an overkill, but cool end result though… No need to get off the couch and dig behind the Christmas tree to plug the lights in/out.

Next year perhaps I’ll use this with an xbee to control the lights outside…

I saw the article on someone needlessly using both an xbee and arduino as the xbee has digital out; will have to look into it.

Obviously he used an arduino so he can add serial-to-Ethernet, because for practical reasons which I’m sure are obvious to everyone, this device needs to implement Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP) in accordance with RFC 2324 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2324